Categories

PublicPolicy

Kids of Bumreet Kailash, a remote valley of District Chitral, KPK Province Pakistan

When we are moving in a fast pace in Post Information Age and entering into Knowledge Age, when the IOT and IOE are encovering the globe and even when we are talking about unmanned cars and smart cities, someone somewhere meanwhile thinks about what will he or she dine or whether he or she will dine or not? Or either anyone within this global family is burning candles to complete his or her homework or someone somewhere is still unaware of the term of smart technology or even the term of technology. This is what we call dividend within our society not only on economic ends, rather on technological end as well.

Pakistan, the land of approximately 200 million people, heavily under different
economic pressures and fighting with the shadows for last one and half decade but is surviving with 71% Teledensity , 34 million 3G/4G users and 37 million broadband users. This shows our nervous strength but it also means 80% of Pakistan is still waiting to be connected. When I’m talking about 80%, here it means a boy in the extreme north of the country and he has to travel for 5 hours just to print one page and a girl living in western side along the Durand Line and because of some controllable and uncontrollable factors is unable to study because her school has been destroyed and she can’t travel to urban land because of serious reasons. It is not only the matter of remote areas, rather within urban lands economic situation and public policies are not feasible for millions to avail the prestige of connectivity.

Still there is gap in understanding within elite brains in Pakistan that technology is not such an important factor to be considered in decision making. But my point of view here is that petro-dollar monetary system has been dead now, next is technological monetary system. For that system to be implemented, connectivity is the key for all, if someone somewhere will be unconnected, he/she will belongs to the cave age. So we have two options:

Devise our own system of governance, economy, society, technology, judiciary, law enforcement, diplomacy, military, corporate and development and first implement that within our own jurisdiction and then on related ones as it’s hard for two distant parallel systems to communicate and coordinate in a better way;

Let’s follow the trends and connect our own citizens within and beyond.

Poverty and unequal distribution of resources is a prime factor of chaos. In coming Knowledge Age when economy and resources will be based upon technology, we have no other choice either than to make our people connected or let others to make connections with them.